


When Someone Says "Red"

by WinstonEli



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Death Fic, Feelings, I'm Sorry, I'm giving nothing away, M/M, Not a very happy story, This was commissioned and it hurts, Trigger Warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 22:29:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2042667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WinstonEli/pseuds/WinstonEli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Red doesn't mean the same thing in Erik's head as it means in another's. </p>
<p>It's because of things like this that Erik hates words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When Someone Says "Red"

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lokesenna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lokesenna/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I own neither X-Men nor sanity. Tim Minchin gets a shout out for the Matilda lyrics that inspired this. "Quiet" is a spectacular song.
> 
> "This is me, just sitting here trolling through the internet, looking at Cherik pictures. I can't believe I used to do useful things." - Eli
> 
> "Write me a fic where one of them dies. That's useful." - Loke
> 
> This work exists only because my darling Loke requested it and because I was tremendously bored. Having finished it, I have decided I am actually not okay with the feelings it gave me and I am NEVER doing something like this again. I am going to watch hours of Green Wing and stroll through the park and remind myself of good and pretty things, and then I'm going to get started on the next chapter of my Cherik epic where people are alive. 
> 
> I am sorry for this.

Language, in Erik’s opinion, was the most complex and superfluous thing mankind had created to date. Even if you happened to speak the same language as the one you were inflicting conversation on, you were speaking in a dialect uniquely your own. Words meant something different to each person, and it was therefore impossible to claim proficiency in anything spoken because it was impossible – _impossible_ – to know what was going on in someone’s head when they heared a word.

 

Take red, for example.

 

Red didn’t mean the same thing in his head as red meant in another’s, when someone said “red”. Sure, there were common associations most people’s brains flit to when the sound of “red” was processed to mean something – a fire engine or blood for example – but once those meaningless relatives to red were discarded, the word “red” took on a meaning personalised to the individual entertaining it.

 

To Erik, red had always been a beautiful word – it was, after all, a beautiful _colour_. It shouldn’t have meant something good to him by all accounts, considering his childhood and the amount of blood that painted that canvas, but the positive connotations he placed on the word stood out in stark contrast to that pain to claim the word for good’s own. When Erik heard someone say red, he was instantly reminded of the people in his life who were most important to him.

 

“Red” reminded him of his mother.

 

They never had much money when he was a child. They had moved from Germany to America when he was only thirteen with their whole lives packed up into a few scant suitcases. His father had taken up work as mechanic and his mother ran a day-care. It wasn’t much, but they got by, and it certainly helped him appreciate the things their meager earnings afforded them. When Erik thought of red, he remembered the shoes he and had saved up for to give to his mother as a Hanukah present. It had taken Erik half a year to scrape together earnings from a paper route and sweeping out the back of his father’s shop to afford those shoes, but Erik wanted his mother to have something _nice_ of her own. His mother – beautiful, warm, caring, and so willing to sacrifice her desires in favour of her family’s – deserved to have at least a pair of shoes like the ones he saw on those glamorous ladies who strutted through the streets, too important to pay attention to the rest of the world, carried off to important places on heels that cost more than his father earned in three months. So he saved and saved and bought her the nicest pair of red shoes that he could find, from a shop guarded by painted women who glared at him the entire time he browsed through their collection.

 

His mother had blushed and laughed and cooed at her boy who had given her such a nice gift, but what was she to do with shoes like this? She put them away carefully in the back of her closet, and Erik only ever saw them (unfailingly) on special occasions – but not once did he suspect his mother of not liking his present. Not once, not after catching her seated on the edge of her bed and looking down at the two slender items wrapped in tissue inside a pristine white box, smiling in the sort of way she had when she saw something she liked and didn’t think she could have.

 

“Red” reminded him of his father.

 

Jakob Lehnsherr had been a hard man with a “no nonsense” set of mind. He worked hard, he provided for his family, and he took great pride in the things he accomplished. Erik’s father was a good man and he loved his family very much. There were times Erik could see how much it wounded him that he couldn’t give his wife pretty things the other women here owned, or that Erik had to go to school in second-hand, ill-fitted clothes and play with toys he had built himself because they couldn’t afford the shining plastic artifacts from the shops other boys played with. Erik never got the chance to tell his father he preferred those toys he built to any shoddily-made action figure. He didn’t get the chance to tell him that “red” meant the nights he would sit with Erik in his tiny bedroom and read from a thick book bound in crimson leather the fairy tales that other parents were too squeamish to read to their children, curled around a flashlight under the blankets until his mother forced the pair of them to pack it in for the night.

 

After his parents’ death, red had nearly run the danger of meaning something horrific in Erik’s mind.

 

Red had nearly meant blood, anger, death, and _revenge_. His parents had died in their own home, shot by a useless waste of a man his father had interrupted in the middle of burglaring their house. His mother, hearing the shot, had come downstairs as well. Erik remembered the shouting and the screaming and the sound of the shots fired. It took too long for him to convince his legs to move, and they were about as accommodating as metal rods as he tried to fly down the stairs to the living room decorated in his parent’s blood. The thief had fled in the confusion. The police caught him not long after. Just a man, strung out, looking for something to sell to fuel his addiction. His parents had died for _no reason at all_.

 

For two years red meant the same thing that it meant to most individuals to Erik – rage.

 

And then, when he was twenty-one and stupid and in the middle of getting his ass kicked by a group of men he accosted for the hell of it, red flared into brilliant contrast to the mundane connotation of simple minds Erik had allowed it to become. Red meant the too-small, idiot _boy_ who flew between himself and the veritable mountain of a man wearing the name Bruce and far too much leather for his flabby paunch. Red meant the too-small, idiot boy wearing a heinous, too- _large_ red sweater talking a mile a minute about “evolution” and how they should really prove they’ve joined that club to distinguish themselves from senseless primates beating each other up over a piece of fruit (to which Erik took issue, because he had been fairly certain he had just been called a “fruit”) and s _omehow_ all that blabbering had done the trick. Most likely, his assailants had simply found the yammering boy to be too irritating to remain in company with. Erik supposed that the arrival of Detective McTaggert contributed to their relent as well. Regardless, somewhere between “Hello, my name is Charles Xavier,” and “I don’t really like eggs, but you should probably eat something and I’m betting eggs are about all you can keep down and – my, but you certainly look grumpy in the morning is that your every-day expression or are you just hung over,” red had rewritten itself in Erik’s mind to mean something good again.

 

Red meant Charles, after that.

 

Charles Xavier, PhD student with the world before him and no one at his back. Charles Xavier, whose mind lit up like the streets of Las Vegas whenever someone said something remotely related to science, who owned precisely own style of sweater, all of which Erik’s grandfather wouldn’t be caught dead in, who spoke circles around people with puppy-dog enthusiasm and a ridiculous, ear-to-ear grin painted by pouty, red lips. Erik had thought that enthusiasm stemmed from his confidence that people would listen to what he said. He soon discovered that enthusiasm stemmed from his confidence that no one cared. Charles Xavier, who could make a saint blush with those coy lips and fluttering, dark lashes, and recite Pi to the fifty-ninth place in about three seconds, had absolutely no one who cared if he lived or died or ruled the world as supreme overlord of the galaxy (Charles’ words, not his. Charles had a flare for Sci-Fi and dramatics.) He lived in a horribly messy apartment, off take away and air, finishing his studies in New York because he could no longer afford Oxford.

 

His parents had thrown him out.

 

Gay wasn’t a lifestyle they supported in their son.

 

Erik had ten years of red after waking up on Charles’ couch. Ten years of red that came to mean the kitsch key-ring of a horrendous, sun-burnt pig in a bikini accompanying a copy of the key to Charles’ apartment; red that came to mean the front door of the slightly bigger place they found together once Erik enrolled back in university and Charles had finally finished his PhD in absent-minded aplomb; red that came to mean the label on the vodka bottle Charles had hidden in the closet, and the confession of a problem he allowed Erik to help him overcome; red that meant the horrible sweater that Charles gave him for Christmas three years in to their relationship, a perfect replica of the one he himself owned, and the discovery that Charles had made it himself.

 

Red that had come to mean the flush on his face when Erik pressed Charles into their mattress and whispered all the ways he loved him against sweat-slicked skin.

 

It was easy to see, then, how meaningless words were. How different a language everyone spoke. How could you understand anything when everything spoken meant something else depending on the person listening? Red meant all the beauty and joy and love in Erik’s life but he knew it didn’t mean the same to everyone. “Everyone” didn’t have his parents, or his Charles, to give the word meaning.

 

Erik had always hated words, ever since he had been forced to learn an entirely different language just to survive, but he didn’t know until now just how much that hatred could grow.

 

Dead.

 

He wants them to stop saying this word most of all.

 

_He’s dead_.

_He lives on in our hearts._

_The ones that leave us are never truly gone_.

 

Oh, _Gott_ , stop saying _words!_

 

Everyone keeps saying these words around him, around _Charles_ , like he can’t hear them, like he doesn’t know he’s dead!

 

Erik’s dead.

 

Ironically, it looks more like Charles is right now, with everyone patting his lover on the shoulder and bestowing unwanted condolences.

 

_I’m so sorry for your loss_.

 

Charles’ mother was at the funeral, for whatever reason Erik had no clue as to why. But she’s there. Wearing a red dress that matched her lipstick and staring absently at the flowers around _his_ grave as though they offend her sense of décor. He didn’t really have it in him to pay the wretched woman any second thoughts though, not with the way Charles stood with his dazed, lost expression, not listening to any of the useless platitudes people kept inflicting on him.

 

Words.

 

Erik’s dead, but Charles is _dying_.

 

And red starts to mean something bad again.

 

Red was starting to mean the sorrow puffing around eyes that used to be so _blue_.

 

Red was starting to mean the droplets of blood on the grass because Charles was clenching his fists so tight his nails bit into and broke through the skin on his palms.

 

Red was starting to mean a _sound_ – the inhuman sound of heartbreak when Charles’ colleague and friend Dr. McCoy turned him away from Erik’s grave to lead him to his car.

 

He didn’t want to be dead. It wasn’t supposed to be this way! They were supposed to grow old together, and argue about books and political stand points and who took up more space on the bed! (Always Charles. Erik never minded because it meant even more of an excuse to wrap himself around the gorgeous, brilliant, a _mazing_ man he had the dumb luck to trap by his side.) He didn’t want to be dead, because dead meant to Erik something different than it meant to the pretty blonde girl – Raven – who latched on to Charles’ side and cried pretty, useless tears as though Erik meant something to her other than the man who stood in her way.

 

(That’s not really the case, his intelligent side of his brain tried to sooth. Raven was Hank’s wife and a very good woman, and Charles treated her like a sister. But Erik wasn’t feeling very generous at the moment because he was _dead_ , he was being replaced, and he didn’t get to follow Charles home tonight and hold him through his tears like he suspected Raven was going to, just as he suspected Raven sometimes wished _her_ husband was _his_ Charles.)

 

Dead meant _he_ caused Charles this pain, all because some drunk driver decided red meant green, forcing Charles to watch red mean Erik’s blood pooling out on the zebra crossing from where he had been smiling and waving moments ago in front of the restaurant they were meeting at for dinner.

 

Cruelly enough, he was permitted to watch from a bystander’s view as red began to mean horror as Charles pitched through the gathering crowd s _creaming_. He was permitted to follow Charles home and sit on the edge of his bed as Charles threw up in the bathroom, then just plain _threw_ anything he could grab and lift. Cruelly enough he was permitted to watch from a bystander’s view as Charles broke his skin on the mirrors and plates he smashed, more red to besmirch with pain, as though Charles were on a mission to erase all trace of their life together. Then he got to watch as Charles curled up in his stupid red sweater on their beaten-down, burgundy, old-leather couch and fill Erik’s voice mail up with heartbreaking pleas of forgiveness and “please come back” and “what do I do now”. And when the voice mail was full Erik got to listen to Charles cry the entire night as he replayed Erik’s voice message in gruff and irritable tones.

 

If only Erik had known this would be the only thing Charles had to remind him of Erik’s voice. He would have poured his entire soul into the damned message just to remind Charles Erik loved him.

 

He was permitted to watch for the whole week while Charles suffered through funeral preparations, Raven stepping in to take over when Charles just couldn’t do it anymore, and Hank lying beside Charles on _his_ side of the bed so that Charles wouldn’t have to cry himself to sleep alone. He was permitted to watch the funeral, and listen to Charles get bombarded with words like “it’s okay” and “you really made Erik happy” and “ _I’m so sorry”_

 

There wasn’t _anyone_ in the world that Erik knew of who could weaponise words like Charles could. Charles was a master of them, knew how deeply they could wound, and each and every careless person was handing out words like knives on sale at Walmart. Knives to a man without hope. Erik could kill them all. He was permitted to watch all of this, the build up to what he feared would be Charles’ Requiem Mass, and he could feel a pull behind his navel that he understood instinctually – he didn’t get to see anything more.

 

Moving on.

 

More ugly words.

 

Erik hated words.

 

Take red, for example.

 

Once upon a time red meant his mother’s warmth, his father voice, and his Charles’ love. Now it meant the way Charles _screamed_ as Hank _dragged_ him to the car – away from Erik.

 

The word “red” hurt worse than dying. Wherever he was going now, he hoped that words wouldn’t follow him.

 

Part of him suspected he wouldn’t be so lucky.


End file.
